Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Not even bad in a good way

This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

The first thing you notice about "Svjedoci" is that the camera moves. This filmmaker makes extensive use of tracking shots in the opening scene to follow a convoy of military vehicles, and a car that carries our "witnesses". This ain't your father's, or your father's father's European art film; "Svjedoci" plays like a homage to the film-making aesthetics of Brian DePalma, or in a broader sense, the aesthetics of contemporary American film-making. And sure enough, inside a Croatian watering hole, the walls are decorated with movie posters; most notably: "Rocky" and "Jaws", two films that are distinctly mainstream and American. The police procedural, that's the genre "Svjedoci" employs to tell its story about being a good, moral Croatian. To accomplish this mammoth feat with an American sensibility strikes me as being mildly subversive, since American isn't always good and moral.A Serbian man is shot. Croat soldiers pulled the trigger and Barbir(Drazen Kuhn) is the detective willing to prosecute the young men against the wishes of the town. "Svjedoci" wants to make the point about killing in uniform being no less despicable than killing in civilian clothes. We see the trigger-man in both guises. The trigger-man's brother is the moral compass who tries to straighten out his vigilant sibling, which diffuses the narrative somewhat, because we thought Barbir was the story's appointed moral compass. As they say, too many moral compasses spoil the soup. In other words, one hero is more than enough.Somebody is in the shed. The fourth witness is in the shed. Wasting away to nothing, presumably, since nobody is glimpsed providing the prisoner with any sustenance. While the filmmaker occupies himself with all his narrative pyrotechnics(he's no doubt seen "Memento"), "Svjedoci" underestimates the power in getting to know the enemy as a person while his/her fate is being determined. One brother treats this Serb as a human being, while the other brother treats his enemy as collateral damage. Should a child, "Svjedoci" asks the viewer, pay for the sins of the father, who is a collaborator for the enemy? To my surprise, "Svjedoci" isn't some grim movie about life during wartime in Croatia. It's an entertainment first, message second, sort of movie.

Without glamorous Hollywood special effect this movie which on the first glance looked simple manage to convey a very powerful message and compex characters. It is an event (a murder) that under war situation develops very differently than it would be if it is peace; The nationalities of murders and the victims as well as their roles in war became more imortant that the crime itself. The characters and their motivies become more clear as the film develops. I was born in Belgrade so I am very familiar with the tragedy of the Balkan war. However even for my husband who is French and is much less familiar with what happen in 90- ies in ex-Yugoslavia, film was easy to follow and the complexity of the message was easy to understand. We both liked it very much. BTW - Excellent cast.

I find it hard to believe that someone might give this amazing film less than an 8. If they do, it is undoubtedly either because they do not understand it, or for nationalistic reasons. Those who ascribe to a simplistic, black-and-white view of the war in Croatia will be disappointed with the grey in which Svedoci operates. What Bresan achieves is a stunningly human portrait of the nuance between good and evil which predominates in times of war. From virtually every standpoint--artistic, technical, acting, musical--this film is astonishingly good. Though it is about the war in Croatia during the 1990s, the film's themes are relevant to virtually every civil conflict.I highly recommend it to any serious cinemaphile.

Tough to digest movie. But it recalls very vividly the heaviness of war. It shows the gallery of characters who typically benefit from the war and also the ones who get lost in it. My favourite character is bartender Ljubo (Predrag Vusovic), disillusioned, "leave me alone" kind of person, who is very well embedded in the war economy. Kind of a survivor who hates the way his life still goes on. Some of the war scenes may seem shocking to the viewers who were lucky enough not to witness the war in their countries. But for the rest of us, they are very familiar. As for the technical part, the movie is somehow confusing with its back and forth story-line, and some of the acting is not always convincing, but all considered, it's still a great movie for vaccinating someone against military fever.